Persons, Bodies, Selves, Emotions || THE ORGANIC REMAINS: Remarks on the Constitution and...

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THE ORGANIC REMAINS: Remarks on the Constitution and Development of PeopleAuthor(s): John MortonSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, No. 37,Persons, Bodies, Selves, Emotions (April 1995), pp. 101-118Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23171774 .

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SOCIAL ANALYSIS No. 37, April 1995

THE ORGANIC REMAINS: Remarks on the Constitution and Development of People1

John Morton

Introduction

In 1989 over one hundred British anthropologists gathered together in one place to debate the existence of society. More accurately, they discussed the motion that "The

concept of society is theoretically obsolete" and narrowly voted in its favour (Ingold 1990b). That British anthropology, with its entrenched Durkheimian legacy, could come to the conclusion that it could do without the concept of society is surely a sign of the times we currently call postmodern. These times are felt no less on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1986, for example, Aram Yengoyan read Ortner's (1984) well known discussion of anthropology since the sixties as suggesting that "the very nature and language of our 'most cherished' concept [culture] is no longer either a

point of departure or a point of convergence" (1986:368). At the same time, however, we should not get too carried away with the idea of a

postmodern revolution in anthropology. Perhaps it is true that there is a sense of

ongoing crisis in the discipline prompting us to challenge the "metanarratives"

(Lyotard 1984) or "generalizing frameworks" (Marcus and Fischer 1986) which ideas like society and culture often signal. But it is equally true that society and

culture emerge afresh from the questioning. Indeed, one would hardly expect them to

disappear when the British move to abolish society was passed by a mere five votes and when Yengoyan responds to Ortner by declaring defensively that culture "has its own ontological uniqueness" and is still "the subject matter of anthropology"

(1986:373). Joel Kahn has said that "it seems strange... to hear of the demise of the

concept of culture in recent American anthropology given the preeminent position in

it of Geeitz, Sahlins and their intellectual heirs" (1989:5). It is no stranger, I think, to hear of the demise of society in British anthropology, where social anthropology is still the discipline's flag.

We may, I think, see ideas about the death of society or the demise erf the concept of culture as hyperbole. Nevertheless, exaggeration points to the fact that totalising concepts have been radically reworked into something which, after Ortner (1984), we can call practice — a framework emphasising agency, motivation and creative (or strategic) subjectivity. Except among some of the more extreme exponents of post structuralism, there now seems to be widespread agreement that any aspect of human life we turn our gaze to is the result of construction — an active working through of

practical problems by thinking, feeling subjects who know what they are doing (or at

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least what they are trying to do). And the idea of construction is clearly intended as a

foil against the oversocialised view of human endeavour characteristic of Durkheimian and neo-Durkheimian thought. On the other hand, when we hear about construction — which is often — we usually hear specifically about social construction or cultural construction, which is surely enough in itself to confirm a

sense of disbelief about the theoretical redundancy of the idea of society or the demise of the concept of culture.2

Discourses of cultural or social construction in anthropology, as well as related

disciplines, are currently compelling; but they are also, I think, something of a

conceptual minefield in a time when the discipline is trying to take human agency seriously. Intuitively, it seems that the initial terms in phrases like 'the social construction of sexuality' or 'the cultural construction of the person' operate as a

pointer to what anthropology is still 'really about' — that is, society or culture, however much those concepts have been reworked through recent dialogues with

history. Perhaps, as suggested above, the terms are less a pointer and more a Durkheimian banner, a collective representation under which we can all march in order to claim intellectual domains. Indeed, one rarely hears the phrases 'social construction' or 'cultural construction' without there being such claims oil areas like

sexuality, the person, self, identity, gender, emotion and race — areas which

anthropology thereby wins from the so called 'natural' sciences, particularly biology. Two examples can underline the point. A recent collection of contributions to

"the cultural construction of sexuality" begins with an introduction by the editor. The introduction starts as follows:

The word 'sex' has different meanings. In common parlance, it applies to the categories of male and female... In this regard, it is often thought in western society to be a 'natural' quality, and hence one that cannot be

changed. However, in recent years, a distinction between sex, in the

physiological sense, and gender, which is a cultural construct, a set of

learned behaviour patterns, has been proposed and is now widely used

(Caplan 1987:1). In this example, then, the distancing of constructionism from naturalism (and essential ism) is very explicit: physiology is natural (and unchanging) and is distinct from the "learned behaviour patterns" of culturally constructed gender. The

distincdon between sex and gender is thus made correlative to that between biology and (cultural) anthropology.

What goes for cultural construction can also go for social construction. A recent

collection of papers on "the social construction of the emotions" also carries an introduction which privileges cultural facts, or more specifically what the editor calls, in a string of Durkheimian phrases, "language games", "the moral order", "social function" "narrative forms" and "systems of rules" (Harrd 1986). When we have

managed to contexuialise emotions through an understanding of these five features, says Harr6, only then are we perhaps allowed to track "the physiological details of the various bodily perturbations that severally accompany the activities which the

bringing out of the above five features enables us to understand" (1986:13). The

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split between nature ( "bodily perturbations^ and society ("activities") here is every bit as radical as that between Caplan's nature (sex) and culture (gender). In both

cases we seem to be saddled with the classical nature/nurture rift — in one case in

order to claim a domain for society, and in the other to separate biology from culture. Such examples, are not, I think, atypical in substance or inspiration: both create the rift in order to organise the field proper to (cultural or social) anthropology.

I find this rift problematic in the sense that it creates a space which is difficult to

fill with anything genuinely human, where this latter term is taken to be the reality

proper to the species Homo sapiens — a reality conditioned by and participating in

organic processes. In this sense, I doubt if current anthropology has actually moved far beyond Durkheim's collective conscience, Kroeber's superorganic or White's

realm of the symbol in attempting to establish a site for anthropological metaphysics, a site in which nature and culture exist as mutually exclusive and exhaustive

categories (Horigan 1988). What I wish to do here, then, is attempt to identify some of the inspiration which lies behind this metaphysics. In particular, I want to show that constructionism, insofar as it is heir to the Durkheimian and Boasian traditions, implies its own biologism that is tied to an ideology of humanistic egalitarianism. I also want to say that this ideology distorts the nature of human potential.

However, I do not wish to assume a wholly negative position in relation to

current constructionist trends in the discipline. As I have already stated,

constructionism has arisen, quite appropriately, as a backlash against the

oversocialised view of human life and the image of persons as "culture-infected

zombies" (Ingold 1990:225). Broadly speaking, constructionism is situated within movements in the discipline which aim to dispense with unproductively situated dualisms like society and the individual, culture and biology, and mind and body. The problem is, I think, that it has not yet gone far enough in the direction of transcending and reworking those dualisms. As the above discussion has shown, as

soon as the reified concepts of society and culture are rendered problematic, they

reappear in new guises. It is, I believe, in particular time to dispense once and for all

with the nature/culture or nature/nurture dichotomy so that we may replace it with a

more dialectical conception of persons as dynamic sites poised to negotiate the boundary between internal and external realities. In such a conception, which I

illustrate through a critical discussion of recent work on emotion by Myers (1979, 1986, 1988), the frantic need to define humans as cultural or social rather than

natural simply disappears.

Persons and Human Beings

Initially, let us look briefly at the idea of the person as it is classically related to the idea of being human. This is an important problem, if only because of the fact that, whenever the notion of cultural or social construction is invoked in relation to some substantive ethnographic problem, it is usually tied to some strong form of relativism. Less obviously, perhaps, it is also often tied to some strong form of voluntarism, giving the impression that different societies select alternative ways to

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be, and that there exists out there a global mosaic of such radical alternatives. It is,

I think, no accident that constructionism finds its clearest expression in branches of American anthropology, where, having recently been filtered through the influential essays of Geertz (1973, 1983), it is heir to the Boasian tradition and to Ruth Beredicts's (1934) conception of cultural patterns being forged by arbitrary selection from the great arc of human potential. It is also no accident that it achieves

peculiarly stark expression in liberal, egalitarian agendas which, for example, argue that

what cultures make of sex differences is almost infinitely variable, so that

biology cannot play a determining role. Women and men are products of social relations, if we change the social relations, we change the categories 'woman* and 'man'. On both political and intellectual grounds we would

argue that... social relations determine sex differences rather than biological sex producing social divisions between the sexes (Brown and Jordanova 1981:231).

IX course, neither relativism nor voluntarism imply that exponents of

constructionism do not work with some universal notion of human nature, even if any such conception is overtly treated with suspicion. (Indeed, as I will argue below, a universal notion is apparent.) But they do tend to mean that, generally, 'difference' comes first. Geertz's (1984:276) dictum — if anthropologists want home truths, they should stay at home — seems peculiarly apposite here.

in the current context of global integration, we might argue that anthropologists have no option but to be at home wherever they go. Just as we are enjoined to share the same time with our coevals (Fabian 1983), so too are we being forced to occupy the same space. And there is a long-standing anthropological correlate to this

intensifying unity —namely, tye notion of humanity or human being that has always, in one shape or another, unified the discipline.3 Interestingly, however, the idea of

human being rarely, if ever, enters constructionist discourse. Indeed, within the

language of anthropology (itself, of course, defined as the study of humanity) it seems

intuitively paradoxical to speak of 'the cultural construction of human beings'. And this is so, I think, for the same reason that sex can be split off from gender —

because human being tends to be globally defined at the level of the species Homo sapiens, a strictly biologically defined entity. Since biology and culture are still largely deemed to be exclusive domains, the idea erf a culturally constructed human

being seems odd, or more awkward than the idea of a culturally constructed person. But to what extent can we distinguish a person from a human being?

Kadcliile-Brown, in his own fashion following Durkheim, did make such a listinction. It is worth citing, if only to illustrate some of the roots of contemporary iualism in constructionist discourses.

tvery human being living in society is two things: he is an individual and ilso a person. As an individual he is a biological organism. Human

Kings as individuals are objects of study for physiologists and ssychologists. The human being as a person is a complex of social

relationships. As a person, the human being is the object erf study for the

04



social anthropologist. We cannot study persons except in terms of social

structure, nor can we study social structure except in terms of the persons who are the units of which it is composed (1952:193-94).

m en eel, numan beings per se become the equivalent of a universal, biological

individual, while the person becomes a socially relative bundle of roles. However, persons and individuals are also two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the same

human being. To be human is to embody this duality and to be simultaneously a

universal biological type and a distinct social being. However, tnis is not tne only possible strategy for defining the scope of

anthropology. Leslie White, for example, took Durkheim's insistence that social reality is a symbolic reality and turned it into an absolute determination as anthropologically typical as anything produced by Radcliffe-Brown.

All numan behaviour originates in the use of symbols. It was the symbol which transformed our anthropoid ancestors into men and made them

human. All civilizations have been generated, and are perpetuated, only

by the use of symbols. It is the symbol which transforms an infant of Homo sapiens into a human being; deaf mutes who grow up without the use of symbols are not human beings. All human behaviour is symbolic behaviour. The symbol is the universe erf humanity (White 1949:22).

rhe position here, of course, looks diametrically opposed to that of Radcliffe-Brown, since he at least allows human existence to be partly defined at the level of biological reality. In effect, however, the two positions stem from an identical dualistic netaphysics. Radcliffe-Brown defines persons metonymically by dissecting human existence into biological and moral orders: White defines persons metaphorically by identifying them exclusively with the symbolic order. The historical tensions jetween British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology pale into nsignificance alongside this common acceptance of human uniqueness defined by so :alled 'sociocultural' codes.

it one picks up a dictionary, it is, in fact, likely to define the word person as

individual human being" (The Concise Oxford Dictionary). In a fairly recent court :ase in Hawaii, in which the question was raised as to whether dolphins could be xxsons or 'others', the legal judgement proved to be negative. A dolphin, said the ludge, could not be 'another' because the word 'person' means human being 'Midgley 1985:53).4 But things get complicated when philosopher and animal rights campaigner Mary Midgley takes issue with the Hawaiian judge, partly on grounds of cultural (or historical) relativism, and partly on grounds concerning what we might 'rather awkwardly) call the cultural construction of species. According to Midgley, slaves, women and other human beings have been defined as non-persons at various noments in history, thus demonstrating that the link between persons and human >eings is not intrinsic. And just as human beings have been non-persons, so non lumans have been persons at certain times and in certain places. In one notable case )f bestiality in Spain, a man was tried and convicted of the criminal act. The donkey, m the other hand, was acquitted once it had been found that she had been raped Hegeler and Hegeler 1972). However, no character reference saved the dog which in

05



1679 was hanged in London alongside his female human consort after both partners

had been found guilty of their crime (Ritvo 1990:1). At this time, European laws

routinely gave non-human animals rights and responsibilities which would nowadays be quite unthinkable.

The wergild of Germanic jurisprudence extended to all members erf the

household, which included domestic animals as well as women and serfs. In the absence of human witnesses to a burglary, dogs, cats, and cocks were permitted, under the same code, to testify in court — or at least their

presence in court was considered to strengthen the aggrieved householder's complaint (Ritvo 1990:1).

Perhaps examples like these should come to anthropologists with no aura of

strangeness. After all, 'totemism' and 'animism' are some of our oldest problems, and ethnographic records are replete with examples of people who refer to themselves

as 'real people' or 'true humans' and others as something not much more (or even

much less) than dogs. One could even argue that the examples should not shock us

in terms of common sense, since few of us do not know at least one other person who

treats (some) non-human beings (pets, cars, computers, etc.) more 'humanly' than

(some) human beings. Yet the examples do seem strange, and they seem so precisely because of our anthropological understanding, which is based on a severe restriction of notions of fellow feeling and human projection (Luckmann 1970).5 We rarely employ the cultural construction formula to ask questions about which humans are

persons and which are not, except perhaps in relation to the so called 'socialisation' of infants. Even less likely are we to employ the formula to ask questions about the

personhood of non-humans, except where we allow for some heavily qualified form of metaphorical extension, as in the case of pets. On the whole, anthropology strongly resists both possibilities and seeks to preserve the integrity of its species focus, which is one reason (among many) why ethologists, animal behaviourists and

sociobiologists are destined to remain marginal to the discipline (Sahlins 1977). In the end, we are characteristically at one with both the dictionary and the judge. Even

though we accept a universal condition of humanity, perhaps given both biologically and existentially, and oppose it to a culturally relative notion of personhood, we still treat a human being as a person and a person as a human being. We give them a kind erf reciprocal definition which turns them into two sides of the proverbial coin, not noticing that the currency is formed by the same kind of metaphorical extension and recognition that in other times and other places has framed non-human animals

as persons and humans as non-persons.

My impression is that few anthropologists are prepared to think outside of this identification. Even the most ardent relativists may still be staunch defenders of the

integrity of Homo sapiens, and the identification seems to carry with it a number of moral judgements characteristic of humanistic discourses. Indeed, I would argue that this view typifies something quite essential about much of our a priori thinking about who (or what) humans 'really are', where this reality is based on a philosophy of egalitarianism — hence constructionism's strong alliance with areas of the

discipline concerned with gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on. "Bom equal,

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constructed unequal" could be seen as the new form of Rousseau s Man is bom

free; and everywhere he is in chains" (although Rousseau himself did not deny the

significance of natural inequalities — 1973:44). Hobbesian echoes seem to be far less strong in the constructionist literature, notwithstanding contemporary concerns

with the will to power (which tend to be strangely located in the ongoing Durkheimian, largely Foucauldian, strands of post-structuralism6).

I submit that the biologism of a universal humanity is primarily a moral position. Whether or not, as academics, we live up to such egalitarian standards would be a

moot pant, but I would only suggest at this stage that it may be time to begin reconceptualising this aspect of our a priori thinking so as to look for more

productive ways of integrating biology with our discipline. So far, all I have done is to suggest that anthropology does embrace biologism, even at the point where it

usually actively denies any such thing. Basically, that biologism inheres in the tabula rasa fiction which always underscores egalitarian discourse. That fiction is, I think, no longer convincing. To quote one authority: "Could any creature as complex as a human being be as totally malleable as the tabula rasa metaphor suggests?... Rigid oppositions between nature and culture, human and animal are dangerous —

they obscure more than they reveal" (Horigan 1988:102-3).

Emotion: A Case in Point

Obviously, with respect to such issues, a great deal pivots on our definition and use of the idea of embodiment. As a biological entity, we tend to take the human

organism to be in some sense universal and invariable, a sort of bedrock of "generic

animality" (Ingold 1990:210) on which culture builds or inscribes itself. Evaluations of the body are, however, seen as relative and symbolic, presenting us once again with a nature/nurture split. Much of the cultural construction of emotions literature, for example, maintains this rupture. As Lutz and White state in their review of publications in this area, a "view that emotions may be construed as ideas as much or more than psychobiological facts" is increasingly replacing the old "dominant paradigm" where emotions "are treated as material things... constituted biologically as facial muscle movements, raised blood pressure, hormonal and neurochemical

processes, and as 'hard-wired' instincts making up a generic human psyche" (1986:406-7). However, I now want to put forward an argument which virtually

dispenses with this opposition between, on the one hand, the universal ("generic'O and biological, and, on the other, the culturally relative.

In a number of places, Fred Myers (1979; 1986) has generally analysed the emotional life of the Pintupi Aborigines of Central Australia. He concentrates a great deal en the idea and ideal of compassion, which he sees as being at the very heart of Pintupi identity and sociality, playing a key role in the construction of kinship universes and the polity. He treats the idea, and its practical implications, semiotically and ethnopsychologically, just as he treats the emotions generally in terms of moral evaluation and modes erf relationship. In his view, "emotions represent forms of judgement: means of evaluating the relationship between an

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individual and his or her circumstances (1986:105-6). Thus, compassion is always relational: Pintupi are always compassionate towards someone or something framed

specifically by 'local knowledge' (Geertz 1983). In broad outline, this looks like a standard relativist/cultural constructionist

position. However, Myers is not, in fact, a strong relativist, and in a more recent

publication (1988) has elaborated on his Pintupi material to make it come to terms with a form of universalism. Dealing primarily with anger, he shows how this emotion is linked semiotically and practically to compassion (as well as other sentiments like shame and sorrow) and relatedness. Anger is expressed, he suggests, when the subject experiences a break in specific relations of identification and

sympathy. But he further contends that, as anthropologists, we might be interested in two facets of this anger. One he calls the meaning of anger, the other he refers to as its logic. He am tends that the meaning of Pintupi anger is culturally specific, being related, for example, to people's reciprocal expectations between given categories of kin. On the other hand, the logical form of this anger is genuinely universal or 'transculturaT: as with anybody's anger, the notion is implied that the "subject evaluates some entity in the world as unjustifiably threatening him or her and desires

punishment for the causer of the harm" (1988:597). In this way, Myers argues that he retrieves universality in terms of an approach

which simultaneously emphasises "the role of the circumstances of the world in

giving meaning to emotions and the cultural definition of the subject" and "the

generic existential dilemmas" of that same "cultural subject" (1988:605). I

emphasise the word 'retrieves' here, because Myers explicitly addresses the issue cf the "old paradigm" where universality was located in biology. He concludes that the

"problem of the universality of emotions is not trivial..., but we err in attributing this to biology — our own indigenous psychology — especially as it is defined in our own cultural model" (1988:606). There is, I suggest, some immediate benefit in this

relocation of the universal/particular opposition within a framework of logical forms

and specific meanings, since it points us in the direction of transforming the simple minded dichotomy of biological universalism and cultural relativism.

To ask questions about the logical form of anger is not to ask whether anger exists everywhere, but to ask what the criteria are for our general recognition of that

anger. Thus the opposition between universal and particular becomes not one

between biology (a universal human embodiment) and culture (specific universes of

relationship and communication), but one between the possibility of anger and the concrete realisation of that possibility. Something similar, I think, could be said for all other emotions, as well as all other attributes of persons as intentional agents. What one deals with at the universal level is a peculiar human potential: at the level of the particular one deals with actual manifestations of that potential. Both universal and particular attributes of persons are simultaneously existential rather than being opposed as biology is to culture.

There is, however, one worrying aspect of this construction. Myers' argument dispenses with the need to refer to a universal biology, but the implication of this

programme is that one would also haw to radically revise our idea of the culturally

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particular. If it, is the case that we can arrive at universal, existential definitions of

the potential attributes of persons (which some would no doubt think to be a controversial claim), it is surely also the case that particular instances of these attributes are not so much distributed through 'societies' or 'cultures' as through

people. Anger, for example, is a universal human potential: instances of this

potential crop up from time to time and from place to place, but, arguably, they do not characterise 'societies' or 'cultures'. These instances will, of course, involve

particular social relationships and peculiarly inflected symbolic codes. Standardising such relationships in terms of cultural stereotyping may have the advantage (or disadvantage?) of highlighting degrees of achieved conformity, but it is not the gross abstractions 'society' or 'culture' which are actually evidenced. Indeed, the

opposition between the potential of people and the realisation of that potential in

peculiar circumstances is, I think, more strictly analogous to the longuelparole distinction made famous by Saussure and his structuralist followers —a distinction that opposes what can be said to what is actually said. As has often been pointed

out, it is language in the abstract which is analogous to the idea of society or culture,

yet language is nothing without speech, just as codes are nothing without messages and societies are nothing without people. I therefore see no advantage in

distinguishing the logical form of, say, emotions from particular meanings of those emotions along the lines of a homologous distinction between the universal and the

culturally specific. In this sense, both logic and meaning of an emotion are equally cultural, as Myers suggests: but specificity inheres primarily in the contexts of

particular actions, not within the particular codes that are used in those actions. This in turn leads to the problem of the relocation of biology. Myers makes the

general point that we ought to be able to ground the emotions in both phylogenesis and ontogenesis, and correctly points out that these should not be construed as 'pre cultural': "From an evolutionary perspective..., the conceptual is integral to what a

human emotion is" (1988:603). This theme is echoed more cogently in the recent work of Tim Ingold, who, within the wider context of a broad, eclectic and ambitious

programme (1986), has argued that "anthropology — including what passes as 'social' or 'cultural' in orientation —falls entirely within the domain of biology" (1990:208). He also takes issue with Radcliffe-Brown and states that, for human

beings, there are not two different entities known as 'individuals' and 'persons', or

natural beings genetically determined and social beings culturally determined, but

only singular organisms. "As the person is an aspect of the organism, so social life is an aspect of organic life in general. In that sense [the process of becoming a person] may indeed be said to have a biological basis" (1990:220).

This argument, which I would identify as lying largely in the materialist traditions which produced Marx and Freud (rather than Durkheim and Boas), has

important implications for the reworking of the opposition between the universal and the particular in human affairs. An argument which recognises the central place of

biology in social or cultural anthropology does not have to be crudely reductive, and

one might concede that there is nothing intrinsically wrong in arguing for the

phenomenological integrity of, say, the emotions relative to questions of instinct and

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organic structure.7 On the other hand, this integrity is partial. While it may true to

say, as Myers does, that we err in the manner by which we equate universal attributes with a biological substratum, we are still left with the problem of locating the very obvious fact that human beings or persons are biological organisms. After all, the claim that there can really be any such things as "unnatural emotions" (Lutz 1988) is

surely self-evkkntly false. n we adopt Ingold s position, however, we are forced to admit that biology,

defined in terms of a logic of simultaneously social and organic relationships, must itself be part of the very logic/meaning dichotomy framed by Myers. That is to say, human attributes, which are characteristically organic as well as symbolic, have to be

systematically defined in terms of a dialectical relationship between the possible and the actual, or between what Myers dubs "the one and the many" (1988:592). If we

recognise this, we would no longer be able to blithely assert or routinely imply that, biologically speaking, we are all fundamentally similar or the same (the primary doctrine of humanism). Instinctive relations, of the kinds originally envisaged by writers like Marx and Freud, are themselves historically relative, and one of die

implications of this is that the 'thing' which we so often reify as culture is not only far more fragmentary and socially diverse than we are prone to recognise (Kahn 1989), but also more fundamentally visceral as well. According to this view, we differ culturally as we differ naturally: the visceral and the semiotic entail each other in this way. However, this is not a claim for cultural determination. It is to suggest that, as social and cultural anthropologists, we need not eschew biology: rather, we need to distinguish between using it well and using it badly.8

Against Misleading Dichotomies

Lngolu maintains that:

In the old days of the nature/nurture debate, nature was identified with a

set of internal, hereditary influences, nurture with a set of external, environmental influences. Depending on which side of the debate you took, either the one or the other set of influences was supposed to prevail. Modern biologists dismiss the debate, claiming that behaviour is the combined product of both innate and environmental factors, though in proportions that are variable and empirically difficult to determine. But although the debate has been declared obsolete, the terms in which it was conducted obstinately persist (1990:223).

l*art of this persistence inheres in the ongoing textbook conflation of 'culture' and 'environment', embodied in liturgical phrases like 'culture is learned', a formula which currently drives many liberal, humanistic agendas both inside and outside of the academy. Yet, as Ingold would suggest, the phrase may be extraordinarily [msleading.

I he precise manner in which the standard culturalist position misleads was recently illustrated by Helen Macbeth (1989), who, within a context of pedagogical disagreement between biological and social anthropology, identified four conven

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tional oppositions that are generally badly understood, among both academics and

others: innate/learned; biological/sociocultural; animal/human; genes/environment.

These oppositions, she implies, could be arranged as a conceptual map, whose

contours would be accurately delineated by a classically Aristotelian table of

opposites (cf. Needham 1973) allowing metaphorical extension between levels. Not

only is the innate normally conflated with the biological, the animal and the genetic, but, correlatively, the learned is usually conflated with the sociocultural, the human

and the environmental. Yet, as she ably demonstrates, not only are all these

dichotomies false — learning is a function of the innate capacities of the organism, just as the organism's development is subject to the influence of communication; bio

logical development is subject to social influences, just as social development is

subject to biological influences; humans are animals, just as other species can share our attributes; genetic potential is realised only in relation to environmental

conditions, and vice versa — but the sets of equivalences are far from precise, with

'innate', 'biological', 'animal' and 'genetic', on the one hand, and 'learned',

'sociocultural', 'human' and 'environmental' on the other, having quite distinct

shades of meaning. While these sets of meanings are undoubtedly empirically linked, Macbeth shows that their rigidly defined terrain in popularly conceived discourses

covering fields like intelligence and disease (to which we could add others like

emotion, race, sexuality and gender) suggests the presence of a distorting ideology. I have suggested that this ideology is conjoined with the contradictions of humanism, a social fact which would be worthy of further exploration. It is not my purpose here to embark on that exploration, but I do want to suggest a way out of the ideological fog.

The interest in biology exhibited in the work of social anthropologists like Ingold might suggest a changing attitude towards the organic. Indeed, as other papers in this volume would indicate, more anthropologists do seem increasingly ready to look towards biological facts as being critically determining in human affairs. Similarly,

recent collections of papers on aspects of culture and self (e.g. Schwartz, White &

Lutz 1992) are beginning to include essays on biological structure and function (e.g.

Chisholm 1992; Worthman 1992), just as other works (e.g. Samuel 1990) are being published which parallel Ingold's social anthropological concern with the human

organism. The evidence suggests that we may indeed be in the presence of a

beginning of a change of heart. While this change may be somewhat minimal at

present, I believe it has much to do with the sense of qualified unease with traditional

concepts of society and culture to which I drew attention at the beginning of this

paper. Ortner s (1984) concern with practice (after Bourdieu 1977), or what I earlier

referred to as "a framework emphasising agency, motivation and creative (or strategic) subjectivity", is part of a general admission of the significance of Weberian

methodological individualism in recent anthropological discourse. Given that

previous concerns with collective conscience and the superorganic relegated the status of the individual to a biologism (Radcliffe-Brown), it is perhaps not altogether surprising that a concern with agency should lead to an at least partial rapprochement with biology. While such rapprochement is certainly contestable (Weber's own work

Ill



suggests that methodological individualism hardly necessarily entails biologism),

agency is a difficult notion to theorise in relation to culture or society without recourse to some notion of the innate. After all, where can agency come from, if not

from within, as something logically prior to the social situation in which it is, for the moment, being expressed? Non-recognition of this straightforward fact is just one cf the pitfalls marring the work of cultural determinists like Geertz (1973), who wilfully ignore Weber's emphasis on motivation and cannot conceive erf persons outside of

public discourses exclusively described as external codes (Austin-Broos 1986). The basic issue that arises, then, relates to the nature of the innate. The

dictionary definition of this term is "inborn" or "implanted by nature", and, as Macbeth suggests, this is conventionally taken to mean 'biologically given' and

•genetically determined' as part of our 'basic animality'. Recent anthropological work, including that supposedly building on Ingold's lead in incorporating biology into social anthropology, can still evoke this string of dangerous equations by making the moment of birth "the point of transition between nature and culture"

(Goldschmidt 1993). But, if I correctly understand the general thrust of Ingold's argument, the quest for such points of transition is not a particularly fruitful

enterprise. If nature and biology are not contrasted with and opposed to culture and

society, then there cannot be any moment when a pure and unadulterated 'nature'

confronts 'culture'. According to Goldschmidt, who works within the logic of this confrontation:

the infant brings to the experience of the first moments of life the

propensity to seek social response from its mother and in turn to respond to her responses. What begins in the infant as entirely internally directed behaviour becomes increasingly subjected to external demands, since

following these new wellsprings of action leads it to the gratification it is

programmed to seek. In the process, the infant learns first to feel and later

to think as do those around it; its motivations become socially defined

motivations and its gratifications become socially defined gratifications... This is the dynamip relation between the genetic and the cultural, between

biology aid anthropology (1993:355). In this conception, the innate is that which is given pre-socially (and presumably pre symbolically), which is the human condition only in the womb. And yet, in the spirit of Macbeth's remarks on foetal development (1989:13), we can simply say that the

argument collapses at the moment we note that the in utero infant's changing constitution is subject to environmental influences that may be simultaneously physical, social and symbolic (like maternal smoking). One could even pursue the matter to its logical conclusion and say that, since the human infant has its origins in an act of sexual intercourse, or some other externally driven act of fertilisation, the

idea of an originary "internally directed behaviour" is doubly false. How, then, should we think of the human infant in utero — as being purely the product of

socially defined motivations and gratifications? To say the least, this seems

implausible — about as implausible as the idea that to be cultural or social means

only to feel and think like those with whom one shares an environment. The

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exposure of this view as fallacy applies most particularly to studies of children and

their social and mental development (Torren 1993). A better strategy would be to start from Ingold's premise that social life is "a

progressive 'building up' of relationships into the structures of consciousness", a

process he regards as the "equivalent to the generation of persons" (1990:222).9 Persons are human organisms, and, like all organisms, they are involved in a process of adaptation and cyclical regeneration. According to Goodwin:

There is no organism-environment duality in this process because the

dynamic of the life-cycle extends across the boundary between the two. In

thermodynamic terms, organisms are open systems. For example, there are developing marine organisms that generate electrical fields due to ion fluxes that extend beyond their structural boundaries, so that dynamically they are continuous with the environment, and similarly with other mass flows. We can, if we wish, separate different states of organization of

matter, such as the living and the non-living, liquid and solid. But because one can transform into the other, the boundaries are always fuzzy, and the different states are united under transformation. Thus, duality is

replaced by state transition in a unified dynamic, so that there is no more of a duality between organism and environment than there is between bone and muscle in the organism, or between nucleus and cytoplasm in a cell (1988:105).

This argument, which "leads inexorably to the familiar proposition that life is process and transformation" (Goodwin 1988:105) and moves us away from Aristotelian or Cartesian dualisms towards a more Heraclitean or Hegelian vision of the world, recalls the maverick propositions of Gregory Bateson (1973, 1980; Bateson and Bateson 1988), in which the very same logic of process was invoked to integrate the mechanical, the biological and the symbolic. These propositions in turn recall the

programmes of Freud and Marx, in which our instincts, expressed as desire or

labour, are viewed as essentially transformational.

I believe it remains convenient and necessary to think of a person as a boundary (as, for example, in the conventional discourse of psychoanalysis, which classically models the ego on the surface of the body [Freud 1984:364]). However, the

permeability of this boundary is evidently just as important as its integrity, not simply because the body's activity provides a model for the projection erf 'society' (Douglas 1966, 1970) or motivates the 'sensory poles' of sociologically significant symbols (Turner 1967), but because this activity in good measure is society, and because culture is largely constituted through corporeal extensions and penetrations, amongst which we would have to include the processes erf language and other symbolic activities.10 However, there is no reason at all to suppose that culture is constituted

exclusively by these symbolic activities, any more than there is to suppose that human society consists solely of human interaction and intersubjectivity. While the discourses of recent ancestors suggest the opposite, by hijacking culture and society in the name of "webs of significance" (Geertz 1973:5), "the domain of semiology" (L6vi-Strauss 1967:17) and "the universe of rules" (L6vi-Strauss 1969:29-41), it is

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evident, I think, that these are not only partial renderings of human relationships, but

also renderings which lead to insuperable anthropological problems. Does an infant or pet animal, for example, really lay outside of 'society' because erf its lack of command of certain rules and symbolic codes? And how can we even conceive of that transitional moment when we judge an infant to have been 'socialised' or 'enculturated'? Yet, if we freely admit that human society and culture consist just as much in foetal development, breast feeding and the nurturing of cats and dogs as in

marriages, gift exchanges and the reading of texts, these problems disappear at the moment we are led to a more powerfully embracing ecological conception of

anthropological work. This is the only answer to the suggestion that anthropology has Reached for the

glittering ring of socially constructed meaningfulness" but has "lost [its] footing on the ground", and to the question: "How can we achieve an ontology that points to

meanings without determining them, that denies scientistic physical ism without

adopting the sort ctf pseudo-scientific idealism that has always plagued the social sciences?" (Reed 1988:111). And it is an answer that flatly contradicts the restrictive boundaries of conventional social and cultural description. While human beings, by definition, remain the anthropologist's primary frame of reference, we evidently need to be much more careful about cordoning off sections of this frame and labelling them genuinely social, cultural or even anthropological. Often such cordons are

simply offences against nature, as in the case of our depiction of the innate as a

wholly unalterable given.

Conclusion

So check beneath your fingernails In between your toes

Right between your earlobes darling That's where culture grows

These lines, penned by Thomas Dolby for a song about Western "pulp culture", are

suggestive about general anthropology and its conceptual map of personhood. In

Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, Kroeber apd Kluckhohn

(1952:62-63) point out that the word 'culture* is derived from Latin roots which have the primary meaning of 'tending' or 'cultivation', and that this meaning is preserved in words and phrases like agriculture, bee culture, silk culture, pearl culture, bacterial

culture, and so on. Thus understood, a culture is the process of cultivation, meaning the mutually constituting actions of affording and receiving an environment which, ideally, fosters growth and development, usually (but not always or entirely) organic. But, as Kroeber and Kluckhohn proceed to establish, this general meaning changed and became heavily qualified in relation to human culture, where the exclusive

emphasis came to be on symbolism, education and tradition (cf. Jackson 1989). In

turn, culture itself became synonymous with the human, as the ultimate outcome of evolution and history, thus rendering the famous definition:

Culture consists of patterns of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted

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by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups,

including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (historically derived and selected) ideas and

especially their attached values (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952:66). Influential introductory textbooks (e.g. Keesing 1981:67-75) continue to foster this view, although some considerably qualify it (e.g. Harris 1993:103-16). I know cf none that are quite bold enough to give equal footing to the growth of dirt 'beneath

your fingernails', the bacterial growth 'between your toes', and the growth of

knowledge 'right between your earlobes'. Yet, manifestly, these are all subject to culture in its etymological sense.

Cultivation is direction, but it is not absolute external determination. Education

is coextensive with cultivation, in the sense that both have the meaning of developing potential, which in living organisms must be regarded as innate. This potential is neither limitless nor rigidly fixed. It changes in relation to affordances given in the environment, just as the environment is itself changed by the developing organism (Reed 1988). Culture, I submit, is this dynamic social relationship between the

organism and its world. It is not, in principle, wholly limited to human beings, any more than human beings are wholly limited to intersubjective or symbolic relationships. In this sense, the 'cultural' in 'cultural construction' and the 'social' in 'social construction' are redundant. It is time to stop using them as synonymous with 'human', 'symbolic' and 'rule governed'.

Recent trends in anthropology towards a less integrated conception of culture, with "the stress [shifting] from single ethos... to contention" (Kahn 1989:14) and with the acknowledgement that "ethnography... now contends with boundaries that

crisscross over a field at once fluid and saturated with power" (Rosaldo 1989:45), should not blind us to the many Boasian and Durkheimian continuities in the discipline. I think that much of this continuity inheres in the persistent humanistic

biologism to which I earlier drew attention. The view I have put forward here

challenges this biologism, but therefore remains problematic in terms of the

egalitarian ideologies which pervade anthropological and cultural studies. While the notion of a human essence is much criticised these days, it seems to me that anthropologists still largely retain an ideological commitment to a common humanity defined at the level of the species Homo sapiens. The tabula rasa fiction behind this humanism allows them to detach both culture and personhood from 'the world' and

depict them, in a unified field, as equally valid manifestations of a limitless human potential — 'the mind'. Dialogism, allied with the notion of plural voices and a Focus on textuality, is possibly the most recent manifestation of this humanism (often now a falsely 'anti-humanist' humanism), which has thus adjusted to the so called post-colonial environment of the 'global village'.11

Broadly (noil-vulgar) materialist critiques of the current usage of the metaphor cf ailture-as-text (Friedman 1987, Kahn 1989, Keesing 1987a, 1989, Sangren 1988) not only alert us to our ideological use of 'culture', in terms of both academic authority and the institutional frameworks of ethnicity and muluculturalism, but also lemonstrate that this concept still regularly, and mistakenly, overlays the notion of a

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strictly bounded human group. This notion remains largely isomorphic with the

discredited idea of 'race', in such a way as to make 'nature' and 'culture' "categories in a relationship of mutual constitution" (Wade 1993:18). The language of race

largely disappeared from our theoretical vocabulary as a result of post-Boasian developments divorcing it from culture, yet this same culture came to do similar metaphorical work. My argument, approximately consistent with the idea that race, as well as similar or related concepts on the same side of nature/culture opposition, is "socially constituted to its very core, including the avowedly non-determinant

'nature' with reference to which many scholars argue its specificity" (Wade 1993:32), would be that this situation simply arises through culture filling the vacuum created by nature's absence. However, in conceding that nature itself is

socially constructed, partly (but only partly) through the discursive formations of

biology and anthropology, I think it remains important to counter the potential excesses of the idea of "the impossibility of a pre-discursive encounter with 'nature'" (Wade 1993:20). There are encounters outside of discourse: these are social and cultural, too, and must be described as such. To suggest otherwise is to

unnecessarily limit human potential, paradoxically often in the name of liberation and freedom.

In the development of a supposedly multicultural world, anthropology often remains in "the spectacle business", simultaneously reproducing a "sacred circus", a "civilized hall of mirrors" and a "chamber of horrors" (Friedman 1987:46) on the world stage. This genre of production, most recently and starkly exemplified by Millennium (Maybury-Lewis 1992, cf Beidelman 1992), is only possible when

anthropology, in the name of doing the opposite, becomes complicit in the demise of

radically alternative ways to be, assuming that there is a common biological substrate of humanness upon which culture stamps its detachable, and therefore relatively superficial and consumable, forms. A plea for the readmission of the 'organic remains' is thus simultaneously a plea against the 'hollowing out' of culture(s) and

the universal consumption of ideal selves living in ideal worlds.

NOTES

1. This paper was first conceived in relation to the 1990 American Anthropological Association session called "The Cultural Production of the Person". Apart from being aired at the 1991 Australian Anthropological Society conference, it has since benefited

from seminar presentations at La Trobe University and the Australian National

University. Apart from the useful comments received through those channels, I am

indebted to Don Gardner, Tim Ingold and Helen Kavapalu for reading the manuscript and making a number of very helpful suggestions.

2. Indeed, one year after British anthropology formally voted for the death of 'society', it affirmed, by the same method, the proposition that "Human worlds are culturally constructed" (Ingold 1991b). I would concur with Tim Ingold when he states that it is

"revealing that a majority should come out in favour, in consecutive years, of two quite

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contradictory statements" (personal communication 1994).

3. In this respect one might concur with Foucault that "man is an invention of recent

date" (1970:387). While I do not agree with the well known Foucauldian idea that

'man' should come to an end, I will be arguing that certain aspects of the definition of

humanity should be quite radically revised.

4. Discussions about whether or not dolphins have "true language" (Russell and

Russell 1973:180) have to be understood in relation to such legal and moral contexts.

5. Luckmarm's phenomenological views "on the boundaries of the social world" are

highly relevant to some of the main themes in this paper. In Luckmann's scheme, the

projection of 'human being' into the whole of the lifeworld is antologically basic, as

well as ontogenetically and phylogenetically prior. For him, the restriction of this

projection appears to be an aspect of the historical development of civilisation, but he

does not argue that it straightforwardly disappears. Indeed, he is clearly sympathetic to

the idea that the projection is actively repressed, only to return when circumstances are

appropriate. As he says: "the 'universal projection' is not extinguished. Where the

world view is not yet fully internalized, as in children, or where the plausibility

structure that supports the world view is weakened for one reason or another, as among

socially rather isolated persons, the lonely and the elderly, the elementary sense transfer

may be rekindled. Would anyone but an adherent of the most trivial conception of

normalcy stand aghast when a person swears at a stone against which he stubbed his toe,

snigger when a lonely individual forms what appears to be a satisfying social

relationship with a pet, and feel superior to a child that weeps for the injustice of a

Christian heaven without animals?" (1970:99-100). I suspect, in fact, that the range of

these sorts of events is such that they are really perfectly ordinary. 6. While it may seem strange to equate Foucault and Durkheim, I simply have in mind

the way in which Foucauldian analysis tends to privilege 'discourse' over 'the subject'.

This does seem to me to be strongly reminiscent of Durkheim's society/individual

couple and emphasis on collective representations. Insofar as Foucault himself has been

in dialogue with structuralism, this overlap is far from being fortuitous. Others have

noted that Foucault's emphasis on discourse makes him close to both Durkheimian and

Boasian trends in anthropology (Sangren 1990, Turner 1994).

7. Classical studies like Scheler's (1954) work on compassion do this, as does the

work of Myers.

8. In invoking the names of Marx and Freud and their materialist heritages, I do not

mean to be uncritical. Indeed, I would probably concede that both Marx and Freud have

been responsible, in certain respects, for the continuation of the dualistic metaphysics I

am arguing against here — Marx in relation to the disjunction between 'base' and

'superstructure', and Freud in relation to the idea of the fundamental creation of human

subjectivity in early childhood. Having said that, I still believe that, in many key

respects, Marx and Freud represent better ancestral starting points for anthropology than

Durkheim and Boas.

9. This does not imply that relationships are exclusively conditioned by forces Of which

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the organism is aware. The point here is to understand the nature of agency, not to

overestimate its importance.

10. This view is naturally related to the ongoing debates about the constitution of

selfhood in different times and places in the world. While I cannot engage those debates

head on here, it should be evident that I am opposed to those arguments which

simplistically contrast a Western bounded self with a relational self of some 'other'.

Such arguments, often building on the classic statement by Geertz (1983:59), and

reminiscent of some of the earlier excesses of L6vy-Bruhl, are often preposterous

attempts "to project a presumed hegemonic Western construction as a ready foil for ...

discoveries of variable selfhood conceptions in the ethnographic record" (Murray

1993:18-19; see also Ewing 1990, Hollan 1992 and Spiro 1993 for related critiques).

11. This argument is consistent with that of Ingold, who states that the phenomenon now

known as 'ethnicity' "involves the codification of difference in the discourse of

homogeneity" (1993a:229). It is also consistent with the view that it is wrong to depict

human beings as infinitely malleable by saying that 'any' human organism can

participate in 'any' social or cultural environment. As Ingold states, the depiction is

wrong because "it allows the participation of persons in social relations only by

removing the arena of such participation from the real world in which people dwell,

situating it instead in a notional world of symbolic constructs" (1991a:373). Moreover,

"the acquisition of culturally specific skills is part and parcel of the overall

developmental process of the human organism, and through this process they come to be

literally embodied in the organism, in its neurology, its musculature, even in features of

its anatomy. Biologically, therefore, English speakers are different from Japanese

speakers, 'cello players are different from sitar players, lasso throwers are different

from archers" (Ingold 1993b:470).

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